"Marketing is not the art of getting rid of what you have, but of creating genuine customer value." It is always useful to find a good case in point of Philip Kotler's most frequently quoted aphorism. Motorola provides the opportunity. The company is now reeling from its failure to realize that new markets don't mean the same thing as good marketing.　

　　The company has just announced a 10% staff cut and a third quarter of failed estimates of improved performance. The trouble stems from the company's sales strategy to become the dominant marketer of pagers and cell phones in Asia. China alone represented $3 billion in sales last year. With the Asian economy in a tailspin, last year's triumph became this years disaster.　

　　Motorola was the leader in cellular analog technology. Because of this, it did not focus on creating new value for its customers at home and abroad with the superior features of digital technology. Instead it continued to sell its analog technology to new developing cellular markets in Asia, while Ericsson and Nokia became the digital innovators and began to eat up Motorola's wireless market share in the U.S. Motorola customers moved to these companies for their next wireless systems. Now Motorola is left with Asian markets that cannot afford its old technology, and new users in the U.S. who don't know the difference between it and the new digital technology, and are therefore not the best customers to have. Instead of beginning a market like wireless telephony and sustaining technological innovation to generate superior customer value, Motorola sacrificed its leadership by getting rid of what it had, albeit to a tempting market of 1.4 billion people. A short term sales triumph turned out to be a long term marketing fiasco.　

　　Its always easy to be smart in hindsight. Who would have predicted the Asian catastrophe! The real question was whether there was a position of foresight that would have directed Motorola to have acted otherwise? Good marketers devote themselves to their best customers in their primary market. Having gained a customer, their first thought is how to keep that customers through his next purchase, and thereafter...forever. In a competitive world someone will always come up with a better product for customers, and that someone had better be you. The superiority of digital technology was no secret to Motorola, nor were the advances made with this technology by Ericsson and Nokia in Europe. It also was no secret that American customers, especially those who will pay the highest price, will always migrate to superior value. Why then did Motorola expose its customers to competitors by an indifference to the improved customer value of digital technology? Elementary marketing principles were sacrificed to financial considerations. Rather than invest more money in a new technology, the company sought to maximize short-term return on its present analog infrastructure. This meant penetration into the lower consumer echelons of the American market who did not have cellular phones, and finding new markets for whom to produce. Asia and Joe Camel replaced the durable and sophisticated wireless customers, both business and consumer, who started out with Motorola. To further compound matters, currency depreciation is shifting the advantage to indigenous lower cost analog commodity manufacturer. Meanwhile, at home, Joe Camel is hearing digital as providers try to switch the great installed base.　

　　The only answer to Motorola's predicament is to get a good marketer to run the show. They need a Lou Gerstner. MK

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